Damage Control. Gordon Kent

tells me those aren’t the good guys. Come on.”

      Bahrain

      Admiral Pilchard banged his secure phone into its cradle and opened a desk drawer and then slammed it shut with all the force he could muster. He buzzed. “Get the flag captain in here!” he shouted.

      He tried to do paperwork while he waited, but he couldn’t, and she was there in thirty seconds, anyway. When she came in, he stood up and put his fists on the desk and said, “Washington knows! I just got my ass chewed by the President’s personal political cocksucker because I didn’t inform them first about the Jefferson!” He banged a fist on the desk and took two strides away. “Not a word about the danger to the fleet—not a word about the kids who may be dead or dying—!” He swung into a vicious parody of Southern smarm. “‘Don’t you ri-uh-lahze the po-li-ti-cal potenshee-al foah damage heah?’ He’s reading me out because I didn’t call him personally so he can do political damage control!” He stared at her. “Well?”

      “Well, sir—” She spread her hands. “I think we’ve got somebody who’s leaking top secret information.”

      Mahe Naval Base, India

      The hole under the fence was big enough for Fidel to wriggle through on his back. Clavers followed, then Ong, pulled through by the two inside. Benvenuto went in on his belly, jumped up and brushed himself off with a surprising burst of vigor.

      “Save it; you’ll need it,” Alan said. He wriggled through, face up.

      They crouched between two cars in the row nearest the fence. He looked at Ong. “Lieutenant? Can you make it to our vehicle?”

      She nodded. Tears were running down her cheeks. She looked like a very dirty Oriental doll that would cry if you put it on its back.

      “Okay.” He motioned Clavers and Benvenuto in closer, put a hand on Fidel’s back to get his attention. “There are four guys at the gate, plus the guy walking the perimeter. Maybe more, but we didn’t see them. We’re going to try to take them without shooting. Hear me, Fidel?”

      He saw the back of Fidel’s head move in a nod.

      “We’re going to get as close as we can—the front row of cars, with the cars as cover—I’ll already have stood up and said something. Okay? The signal is ‘friends.’ You hear me say ‘friends,’ you’re behind cover, weapon cocked and locked and ready to shoot.”

      “You don’t want us to shoot, you said.” Fidel’s voice was like rocks rattling together.

      “I don’t, but I don’t want us to get killed, either. If they shoot, then we shoot.”

      Fidel turned his head. “You gonna let them shoot first?”

      “If they try to shoot, we shoot.”

      Fidel grunted. “You stand up, you say, ‘Friends,’ they shoot you, we shoot them. Okay, if that’s the way you want it.” He shrugged—quite an elaborate shrug.

      “It’s a matter of timing.”

      “Sure is.”

      If they’d been alone, he would have read Fidel out. He took a breath, exhaled, said, “You got a better plan?”

      “Yeah—waste ‘em.”

      Alan looked at Clavers and Benvenuto. “The goal is to take the gate with minimum damage on either side. Clear?”

      Both nodded.

      “Fidel?”

      Fidel nodded as they had. “When I see your head blown apart, I can feel free to waste them.”

      Alan looked at him. Hard. “If you don’t like my way of doing things, give me the gun and I’ll do it alone.”

      “A-a-a-h—shit, I’m just mouthing off, Commander. I’ll do it your way. But it’s going to be a split-second thing. If our guys were trained snipers, it would be one thing—” He turned on Benvenuto. “How good are you with that rifle?”

      “If it shoots okay, I can hit a paper plate at a hunnerd and fifty yards.” He swallowed. “I hunted a lot of deer. With my dad.” He looked from one to the other. “Honest!”

      Fidel looked back at Alan, raised his eyebrows, shrugged. “He’ll be a lot closer than a hundred and fifty yards. Maybe a hundred and fifty feet. My idea is, Benvenuto aims at the officer. He makes any move when you pop up, he shoots him. The officer’s down, the other guys may fold.”

      Alan cocked his lower jaw forward, thinking about it. “Can you do it, Benvenuto? Shoot a man, not a deer?” He tried to make it as brutal as he could, so the kid would get it. “A man’s head is about the size of a paper plate.”

      Benvenuto swallowed again. “Yes, sir. If that’s the plan, sir.”

      “Okay, that’s the plan. But—” How to make it clear to a twenty-year-old who wasn’t really a warrior? “You’ve got to watch him. If he doesn’t make a hostile move, don’t shoot. But Fidel’s right—if he goes for a gun or orders the others to shoot me or—anything, then you shoot. Okay?”

      “And don’t think,” Fidel said. “You think, you’re too late. Just do it.”

      Alan thought it was a big order for a kid who had been told all his life to think.

       8

      Mahe Naval Base, India

      Alan’s mixed bag of troops—a former SEAL, a boy, a woman, an officer who didn’t like shooting people—trickled down the parking lot between the cars, moving so that they couldn’t be seen from the gate. They had left Ong hunkered down beside their van, halfway down the lot.

      The gate was off-center toward the end of the lot, so that Alan was the only one to its right; the others were staggered up the line of cars on the other side. Alan lost them after they crossed the last roadway, and he pulled up in the lee of a Honda sedan and waited, using the front wheel to mask himself from the gate. He had said he would count to sixty to give them time to get into position. Now that he was there, he saw how difficult it was going to be for Benvenuto, who would have to aim—and shoot, if he made that judg-ment—in a split second. Maybe it would have been better if Fidel had taken Benvenuto’s role, using the AK, but then they’d have no automatic fire ready if the others opened up. Well, Fidel was right—if you were going to do this in a combat situation, you’d give no warning and you’d want only to kill.

      As if this wasn’t a combat situation. No, the trouble here was that Alan was trying to apply an ethic that came from a place outside combat and that was, unless you were an idealist, irrelevant.

      So he was an idealist.

      He watched the last seconds tick down and checked the CZ. He put his index finger along the frame and hooked his third finger into the trigger guard. Well, the second time today. If I’ve been stupid, Rose, forgive me—

      “Friends!”

      He was standing. He had the CZ in his right hand, raised to shoulder height but not pointed at them, the barrel up and the side of the pistol toward them. The hood of the Honda protected his gut and legs, but he was exposed from his belt up. In his peripheral vision he saw Fidel rise on his right, a silhouette in the violent sunlight.

      All five of the Indians were near the gate, three of them focused on the street. One of the others saw him even before he spoke; the man hesitated, then reacted, reaching for the weapon he had leaned against the gatehouse. Reacting to him, the officer turned to follow the man’s eyes, then Alan’s voice, and his eyes widened.